Finding our way back home to simplicity, humility, repentance and personal responsibility through prayer and community.

Month: February 2007

“In the face of all-annihilating weapons, the natural next step may be the use of no weapons. It may be the only possibly effective defense against the ultimate weapon is no weapon at all. It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity, such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.”

Being completely filled (controlled, dominated, etc.) by the Holy Spirit of God can be inconvenient and difficult. What if customarily you prefer to be filled with something else, perhaps yourself? What if you fear, with good reason, that the Lord of the Universe will guide you into personally-compromising places? Continue reading “Be half-filled with the Spirit”

When at 14, I first heard the claim that Jesus was the son of God (somehow my previous church had missed this teaching), I remember that I was most offended by the specificity of the claim, not by anything else.

What makes the gospel offensive is sometimes not its message but its specificity. We aren’t bothered by generalities about spirituality, but we bristle at specifics about our own lives. Continue reading “Don’t get specific with me.”

God has a will and work for us to do, and it doesn’t really matter how we get treated by others along the way. But he doesn’t intend for his purpose to be replaced by someone turning us into a doormat. If I’m going to be a martyr, I want it to be because God commanded it. I have been known to turn the other cheek very belligerently: “I’m laying down my life for you because of what Jesus did for me, buster. This doesn’t mean you’ve won over him or over me.” But that’s not exactly the right attitude! Also, we can replace God’s compassion with human sympathy: “You know, if you really cared about your neighbors, you wouldn’t sleep until they had all been converted”… or until you were hospitalized with exhaustion.